The Mick Jagger of cultural criticism, Slavoj Zizek is Cinefamily’s favorite celebrity philosopher and intellectual rabble-rouser. In the amazing 2006 essay film The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema, the perpetually salivating Zizek joyously explores the flickering art’s finest moments from a psychoanalytic perspective — and this very fun follow-up takes a similar approach, inserting Zizek into scenes from popular films where his radical concepts are illustrated in surprisingly familiar and accessible terms. How do competing ideologies, those unconscious fantasies in the background of our thoughts, shape our tenuous grasp of reality? Zizek finds unexpected answers in even more unexpected places, like the inside of Kinder Eggs and at the bottom of Starbucks cups, but ultimately remains endlessly enamored with movies. Here, he sympathizes with Travis Bickle, provides a path to atheism through The Last Temptation of Christ, offers explanations for the “ideology glasses” in They Live, explains what’s so great about Rammstein, and sinks Titanic in an epic takedown of Cameron’s “Hollywood Marxism”. You’ll laugh, you’ll sigh, you’ll have your brain tied into knots, and you’ll never hear “Ode to Joy” the same way again. Keep the mindmelts coming, Zizek — our sizzled psyches thank you.
Dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2012, digital presentation, 136 min.

Watch the trailer for “The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology”!

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